According to some studies, the volume of information over a network, such as the Internet, is expected to more than triple over the next three years. Data and content is likely to remain the largest percentage of Internet traffic, with the majority of this information being dynamic. Often, the issues of concern with Internet traffic range from business to consumer response and order times, to the time required to deliver business information to a traveler using a wireless device, to the download time for rich media such as music, videos, and so forth. Thus, not surprisingly, a major complaint among Internet users is a lack of speed. Additionally, users' complaints often center on how long it takes to display a web page, or other content, on their computing device. One solution therefore, may be to send less data. This is where compression may help.
The idea is to compress data being sent from a server, and to have a client's browser decompress this data virtually on the fly, thereby reducing the amount of data sent over the Internet, and increasing a web page display speed. Many, although not all, browsers are now equipped to support the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standard that enables compression as a type of “content-encoding.” Content-encoding can often significantly reduce web page download times for highly compressible content, such as text, style sheets, XML, text document attachments, and HTML. The benefit is especially pronounced for clients communicating over low-bandwidth links. However, while static pages can be pre-compressed on a server, compressing dynamic web pages requires significant server resources, and often can not be pre-compressed. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.